RE: The RF Revolver sucks........ or does it
Heh... yeah... Sim models are rather (* cough * ) optimistic at best...
I would love to see sims throw in adjustable amounts of build errors, engine mistuning, and engine weather related variations...
That said, I purchased the GP Reactor EP after flying it in the RF sim, as I really liking how it flew there.
Once I received it I compared the motor configuration to what was recommended. I noted that the sim modeled a completely different motor.
On a whim I ordered the same Rimfire motor & prop.
I was delighted to find that the performance of the real world model closely mimic'd the sim.
I did find that I had to set the C.G. back a bit to mirror in flight characteristics, but that was about the only tweak needed.
In this case the "predictive" aspect of the sim was rather amazing.
As you said, I doubt that someone has dragged every REAL model out to an airfield, along with a beta of a simulation and ran both through the standard trimming tests advanced fliers use.
Observing things like: the degree of change in nose drop when inverted on both the sim and in real life, and then adjusting the sim accordingly, etc... would result in rather amazing fidelity of the flight models... but I suppose that is hardly ever done on any sim, or only on a handful of available models.
I've taken an Alpha 40 trainer out, along with three PC's running Realflight 4.5 to our airfield when we ran a summer kids camp.
That let me highly tweak the user created Alpha 40 model. The results IMHO were pretty impressive.